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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Monday, June 16, 2008
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The VIZO Propeller II System Cooler is an upgrade over the old boring black slot fan and an updated version of their original VIZO Propeller. It features a translucent colour casing, larger blower fan, and a directed exhaust. Everything is still very basic in that the fan installs into your typical expansion card slot, and is powered off a standard Molex connector. But with the quieter blower, and the proposed CFM rating, it claims it can improve airflow and performance.
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Friday, June 13, 2008
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The Kingston 800MHz HyperX FB-DIMMs are hands down the most innovative cooling design that we have seen Kingston bring to market. The design is flawless and the modules run cooler than any other FB-DIMMs that we have seen. For those that want even better cooling, simply place a fan on the modules like we did and you'll notice another massive temperature reduction. When it comes to building a high-end enthusiast platform using the Intel Skulltrail motherboard having the right memory modules is critical and Kingston should be the top brand on the short shopping list...
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The HP 2133 Mini-note Linux Edition is an incredibly good looking piece of kit, but is sadly a classic example of style over substance. Gorgeously designed and stunning to look at, the 2133 Mini-note seems to have it all at first glance. The keyboard is perfectly sized and the screen is bright and perky. It's so pleasurable to use that it could probably only be topped by an invitation to have a go on a jelly-covered bouncy castle with the half-naked celebrity of your choice.
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The EliteXStream is the example of what two companies can think up when they get together. The EliteXStream is a single 12 volt rail behemoth that is sure to raise some eyebrows. The EliteXStream belongs to the crowd of people that believe all the power should be in one main 12 volt rail. This is a philosophy that we have seen for many years from PC Power and Cooling. But if you are a member of the multi-rail power supply club, OCZ has the ProXStream for you. The EliteXStream is available in to varieties, an 800 and 1k models. Each is enough to power the biggest of gaming systems. And today we will be reviewing the 800 watter for you.
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Today we are looking at the interesting mouse replacement called the Novint Falcon. The device allows you to feel items in compatible video games and adds a new dimension to games. Overall the Novint Falcon is a very interesting device. The biggest drawback is the lack of top-tier games that are Haptx enabled. Novint is working on that though and more top-tier titles are coming soon. The Novint Falcon works very well, even if it is a bit sluggish for a gamer used to much more sensitive mice.
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At a modest price the Stinger delivers a high quality, feature packed Laser mouse. Whilst not the best mouse I have tested, at this price point, the Stinger is not too far behind. This is probably the best bang for your buck you can get at the moment.
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Though AMD themselves have an impressive chipset line-up for the Phenom, we can't forget one of the biggest supporters of AMD. In fact, they have helped AMD out something incredible. Starting back when the Athlon was a Socket A chip, nForce chipsets have been around to help boost the performance. NVIDIA are back again with GeForce based chipsets sporting IGP graphics. Today we have our first board from ZOTAC, one of the many companies we met at Computex. They have sent us their GeForce 8300 based Micro-ATX offering aimed at the digital home segment. How well does it perform? Read on to find out.
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Everyone recommends the GeForce 9600 GT first, and they should. It's got a price-to-performance ratio unlike any card before. I'm not exaggerating. This card could very well be the best deal NVIDIA has ever put to market. I spent a day with Chaintech's factory-overclocked card... And I found a couple things I didn't like. Deal breakers? Hardly.
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If you've had a laptop, you've been there; half an hour of use leaves you with an uncomfortable burn, a couple of hours could leave you with a scorching mark. I won't deny that this problem has been overlooked -- but now has finally been taken seriously by the general public. Especially as of late, there has been much concern surrounding the region dubbed by Jonathan Kwan as the "male proprietary region" when using your laptop on your lap. After the studies brought to our attention that the heat from laptops do affect said region, we at APH Networks were panicking -- I mean, we are guys, and we are computer geeks. I was already planning on purchasing a laptop, but I realized that I would need a cooler of some sort as well, so I picked up the Thermaltake iXoft, which we had introduced earlier. However, today, we are taking a look at a product that doesn't aim to keep the laptop cool -- but rather, the user (Hey guys, you'll want to look at this). Differing from laptop coolers in that sense, let me introduce you to the LapLogic G800 Aerogel Extreme. Yeah yeah, it still uses chemistry knowledge -- but for a whole different purpose.
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Whether you want to recognize it or not, power supplies are an integral part of your computer. And it's not just about wattage -- if you don't have a quality power supply that delivers, your latest quad core, pair of graphics card, and half a dozen of hard drives won't run stably. And then you would end up blaming that on the OS or whatever. On the other hand, most people with relative high end configurations probably won't even need 1200W power supplies anyway -- my Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and 8800GTS G92 (Plus all the relatively high end components) needed no more than a quality, efficient, high performance power supply that delivers what it's rated for. I used to run my computer off a Seasonic M12 500W. That was my first Seasonic power supply that impressed me throughly in both performance, efficiency, and silence. When Seasonic released the M12II, it didn't take me too long before I got one and installed it to see what kind of improvements they had made to it, in order to make it an even better power supply. With relatively modest power ratings by today's standards of only up to 500W, how will this power supply accomplish its tasks with the latest configurations? Although we won't directly test performance, as we don't have professional load testers and for the fact that this is only a product report -- we'll take a look at what kind of internal components it takes off with.
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The PC-A77 has some of the great features we have grown to love in Lian Li cases over the years. A removable motherboard tray, top panel, and hard-drive cage make for flexible installation. Their unique hard-drive installation system greatly reduces vibrations, and they even included a fan controller. Continue on as we check this case out in greater detail.
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After a family of gigabit NAS servers from Taiwanese Synology, we got the first similar device from competing QNAP - TS-109 Pro all-in-one NAS server. Imagine yourself as a customer in need of a SOHO NAS server with a gigabit interface (additional features are welcome). Let's see how two competitors meet these requirements.
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We continue reviewing advanced cooling systems. Today we shall examine two High-End coolers from Thermalright: Ultra-120 eXtreme and Ultima-90. In fact, both products are hardly the latest offers. Rolled out long ago, they had enough time to earn users' respect.
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In the previous article devoted to benchmarking an engineering sample of a quad-core AMD Phenom we failed to "cross all t's," because this processor has a bug officially acknowledged by AMD. Now we have an AMD Phenom X4 9850 of B3 stepping, in which this bug is fixed. Since it's the fastest CPU from AMD for now, it will be interesting to compare it to Intel processors.
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The Geforce 9800 GTS has been around for some time now and the maturing of the product brings with it a selection of cards which look to improve on the reference specification or design. We have one such card on our test bench today, XFXs 9800 GTX Black Edition from a handpicked range of cards which feature enhanced core and memory speeds for exceptional performance and stability.
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